Nighthawk Keetoowah Society

The Keetoowah Nighthawk Society was a Cherokee Native American organisation formed ca. 1900 that pledged itself and its followers to return to the traditional "old ways" of Indian life, led by Redbird Smith, a Cherokee National Council and original Keetoowah Society member, and forming in the Indian Territories of present-day Oklahoma. The Nighthawks arose in response to weakening resolve on the part of Cherokee leaders—including the original Keetoowah Society (Cherokee: ᎩᏚᏩ ᎤᎾᏙᏢᎯ), a political organization created by Cherokee Native American full bloods, in or about 1859—to continue their resistance on behalf of the Cherokee after the Dawes Commission began forcing the transfer of Oklahoma tribal lands in the Indian Territory to individual ownership in the 1890s (a process termed allotment). Soon after forming, the Keetoowah Nighthawk Society grew to as many as 5,500, but they could not forestall the progress of the Dawes Commission, which came to an allotment agreement with Cherokee leaders in 1900; after doing so, the Commission enrolled the generally non-compliant Nighthawks in the tribe without obtaining their consents, registering them for allotments, and, in 1902, arrested Redbird Smith and compelled the same of him.

The Nighthawks would not acknowledge these forced commitments, and as other Cherokee become citizens of Oklahoma (statehood, November 16, 1907), the traditionalists, believing that "acculturation represented the greatest threat to [their] people," fled to hilly areas near Blackgum Mountain (in present-day Sequoyah County, Oklahoma). There, on the strength of their commitment and numbers—and using the record of Cherokee and Keetoowah history of a sacred wampum belt that they had located—the remaining Nighthawks "strove to preserve the ancient Cherokee culture," in 1908, electing Smith as chief for life. But, as Michael Lee Weber notes, "his movement had already declined," and by the end of 1918, "Redbird Smith, 'the moving spirit'" of their society, was dead.

Hence, the Keetoowah Nighthawk Society became, alongside the original Keetoowah Society, a spiritual core of the Cherokee people during the years of the early 1900s, in the Indian Territory that would eventually become a part of Oklahoma.

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